I have shut off the debate and am writing with background noise provided by the neighbor's TV set. I will finish this part of this story and then sleep for a few hours as I need to get up at 6AM to get ready to go to Busan in the morning. It's 1AM now.
So I got to Pyeongtaek station and looked around for my brother, who wasn't there. Then I grabbed a taxi and showed him the address of the hotel I had reserved on Agoda.com. This hotel was close to the train station and looked clean. Honestly, the pictures of the inside looked a bit like a Japanese love hotel, but I wasn't going to let that discourage me. Standards are different in Korea. Maybe this was an okay place.
The taxi driver does not try to make conversation. I guess my exhaustion and frustration are freaking obvious. He instead drives us around in a circle and then down a strange stretch of road. One side is blocked off with fences--it looks like construction is happening or a dangerous vacant lot lurks beyond. On the other side of the street there are many well lit, huge-windowed shops. There are a few girls in clothing Japan labels as "fashionable teen clothing" standing around the front, which made me think maybe it was a hair salon, and this is a part time job of theirs or something...
And then there were more. Looking beyond them into the shops I found nothing. Nothing by more mostly-naked, made-up-too-much women of indeterminate age, standing and beckoning to whatever sat in the back of the cab, hoping the hint of foreign face came with a cock and a wad of cash.
I recoiled. It's not that women are not my thing. It's that I wouldn't want to be with a hooker when I was single, much less as a happily married woman.
Then the cab stopped. At the corner. Kitty corner to the brothel was my hotel. I should have trusted my intial urge to tell the cabbie to go on, somewhere, anywhere else. I didn't. I got out and went in, thinking maybe it would all work out.
The guy at the front desk was confused when I came in, by myself and with so much luggage. Maybe he thought I had sex-midgets or a full-leather body suit in the huge rolling suitcase. In any case, he looked at my Japanese-printed form and gave me a room. I went up to it.
I didn't know that you have to put the room key in a slot by the door in order to use the electricity. Instead I would up using the emergency flashlight (which beeped like mad--I'm sure I ruined many an orgasm that night) until I figured it out. The room was normal for a love hotel. I used the toilet and tried to find a place to plug in my laptop, only to find the plugs practically soldered in place. One of them might have been unplug-able but I didn't know what the plug using the outlet belonged to. There was a computer there, so I turned it on, anxious to tell my brother I was in town, my friends and family I was safe, and my husband that I loved him and missed him.
Once the computer loaded and told me a multitude of Korean things, I finally got it to load Internet Explorer. From there, facebook took a few minutes to get up and running (and logged in) before I could post my status update and message my brother, who had messaged me hours before that he would be wandering around the gate waiting for me. I felt like an ass.
So people knew I was safe, and my brother knew I was there, so I went down to deal with the rest. I made sure I had everything and went back down to the desk. When I came out of the elevator and laid the key along with the packet of amenities on the counter, he looked up and asked "Why?"
Really? Why? That wasn't obvious the second I walked in here? Why?
"Do you speak English?" I asked.
"No."
"Nihongo Hanishimasu ka?"
"No." and he smiled. Smiling at me? Now?
"Okay. Let's try English." I tried to explain with as many hand gestures as I could think of without being crass, that I was not comfortable. That the prostitutes across the street made me uneasy. That I couldn't plug in my laptop. That I would not stay here. Not that night or any night. I also said that I didn't expect a refund from him--that I would get it online, just like I had made the reservation in the first place.
Then I asked him to call me a taxi. He really didn't get most of it, but I didn't care. While we waited for the taxi, I asked him if I could use the phone and let him dial my brother's phone number. I spent a few minutes explaining my dilemma. Bill, my brother, listened and heard me out, suggesting I just come to the base once the taxi got there. Not too long after, the phone went dead. This was a landline phone, mind you. I looked at the clerk and tried to explain. He stared at me. "The phone is dead."
"What?" Not believing me. Maybe pointing to the phone and drawing a mime-knife finger across my throat wasn't clear enough.
"E-E-E-E-E-E-E-EEEEEE." I said, mimicking the noise on the other end of the line.
He held the phone to his ear, and the nodded like he finally got it. He offered to call again, and I let him though it didn't go through.
"Maybe you want lan cord?" He asked, like I still wanted to stay there.
"No." Cars kept pulling up, but his fear that they were really customers made him demand I stay inside, waiting for a taxi that can't see me.
So the Taxi left. He went out and came back to tell me "Taxi go."
So I went to go. "No, no. I call."
Okay, so I waited. His call also went nowhere.
"It's fine. I'll walk." I said and hauled ass out of there. Luckily, only a couple of blocks from whore alley was a main street, and 2 seconds after I got there, I saw a taxi.
Thus I hailed my first Taxi.
From there, the night improved. The guy took me to the pedestrian gate at the base and I went into the main desk to wait for my brother. They let me leave my bags there when I went back outside to find him. Then I saw Bill, standing on the other side of the crosswalk, a plastic shopping bag in one hand and a smoothie (for me) in the other.
And then the trip became totally worth it.
The smoothie was awesome, but not as great as talking to my brother. We grabbed my bags and headed out to my brother's favorite restaurant here, which was a great little Korean BBQ joint. Then we went to the nearest hotel with the idea that if it sucked I would go get a different one the next morning before the 1:00 on-base barbecue I was going to with my brother (which turned out the be really fun as well)...so that was the plan.
To our surprise, the lady at the front desk of the first place we came to spoke excellent English. It turned out she had lived in America for 45 years with her American Military husband, but once he died of cancer, she stopped having a green card, so she can't work on base even though her English is a lot better than most of the Korean ladies on base.
She was cool. She got me a room and a lan cable. I cam up to find a transformer ready to go. The room was a lot like a Japanese business hotel room, but a little bit bigger. It was clean. It was not a sex den. I was happy.
My brother headed off and I started trying to relax before contacting my husband for our first skype chat ever.
Then I looked at the sheets.
I'm staying at Hotel Enterprise.
Make it so.
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